[kictanet] Voice based Services Growing Globally

Thu Nov 4 09:51:52 EAT 2010

Listers

Sharing an article from globalservicemedia online on the voice based BPO
Sector. Key to note here is that:

   1. It is an area of growth. Kenya has identified this as an area of
   focus.
   2. Countries need to specialize, even within the Voice offering.
   3. Clients becoming more demanding about what the service providers must
   offer. Lower cost alone are not enough.
   4. The technology companies are improving the tools to assist BPO
   companies provide better services.

Voice-based BPO Industry is RevivingSruthi Ramakrishnan Unified
communication technologies that allow integration of voice with business
processes and collaboration will help voice-based BPOs reinvent their
offerings
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Voice-based services or call center services-- the offering that actually
started it all for the BPO industry in countries like India and the
Philippines, has changed a lot since inception. The very purpose of
outsourcing this service has undergone a radical change.

“Initially, clients preferred to turn the work to service providers because
the service providers offered a cost advantage or some type of 'peak volume
overflow' capacity that the clients could not staff themselves,” says Sid
Pai, Partner & Managing Director, TPI India.

Offshore call centers offering voice-based services were the perfect answer
to this and one saw a massive build up of call centers in the early part of
the decade. Very soon, the industry matured. Many call centers reached a
point where they couldn’t scale up or they couldn’t retain key clients. This
led to a shake-up in the call center industry, especially in India, where
many of them were snapped up by IT services companies ( e.g.
Infosys-Progeon, Wipro-Spectramind, IBM-Daksh, etc) seeking to enter the BPO
industry.

BPO’s addressing the voice market had growth challenges. The way out was to
shift the focus to other areas of BPO like finance/ accounting, mortgage,
insurance and other niche sectors like KPO and LPO. Says Atul Vashishtha,
CEO of Neo Advisory, “The market for non-voice services was expected to grow
faster, as the call center sector was more mature and  significantly
developed ."

*Revival and New Hope*

The voice-based BPO industry is reviving. “Investments in technology
platforms, process improvements, equipment and facilities and acquiring
specific vertical capabilities, made by the service providers are outpacing
those by the client. Service providers are moving up the value chain,” says
Pai.

Voice- based services continue to expand their domain and tailor their
offerings according to the needs of their clients. “Today customers are
looking at unified communications to integrate various communication systems
with their business applications to improve their business processes. These
improved business processes lead to higher productivity for employees and
greater customer satisfaction which in turn results in higher revenues and
profits,” says Minhaj Zia, National Sales Manager, Unified Communications,
Cisco India & SAARC.

*Expanding scope of services*

Clients today have access to a wide spectrum of services under voice. “Cisco
subscribes to a range of services covering the entire gamut from technology
services desk for customers and employees, human resources support for
employees , escalation options for customers for quick access and marketing
access to and from Cisco,” says V.C. Gopalratnam, Vice President (IT) and
Chief Information Officer, Globalisation, Cisco, on the internal deployment
of voice services in the company.

Providers are also developing expertise in niche areas within voice
services. Andrew Kokes, Vice President of The Americas,
Sitel<http://www.osourcebook.com/profile.asp?id=1501>,
cites an example. “Revenue generation is one of the key metrics that Sitel
is measured against for most customer care programs (revenue per month,
revenue per call), and is a large part of our core expertise. More than half
of all Sitel-managed inbound programs incorporate some form of upsell or
cross-sell offer.”

The maturity of this segment allows outsourcing to many more locations as
compared to emerging areas of BPO and thus finding price points and
capabilities according to the specific needs of the client. “In all cases
the services (we subscribe to) have a “follow the sun model” with sufficient
geographical spread to cover all time zones effectively,” says Gopalratnam.

*Collaboration and integration- the new formulas of growth*

Collaboration and integration of communication platforms and capabilities
are the new formulas of growth in this sector. “Collaboration is slowly
moving towards new forms such as Enterprise Social Software, UC as a
Service, TelePresence etc. Cisco’s Unified Contact Center solution....
provides a VoIP contact center solution that enables organizations to
integrate inbound and outbound voice applications with Internet
applications, including real-time chat, Web collaboration, and email. This
integration provides for unified capabilities, helping a single agent
support multiple interactions simultaneously, regardless of the
communications channel the customer has chosen,” elaborates Zia.

Voice services are set to move to a higher degree of integration at multiple
levels. Kokes says, “Voice-based contact center services are rapidly moving
beyond traditional "voice" communication to include a blend of voice and
live-chat (i.e., text based) engagement. In such arrangements, contact
center agents are provided with real-time indicators of a website visitor’s
propensity to purchase, and can invite that online consumer to chat via IM
before the customer navigates away from the site. Such a model also opens
the door to Pay-for-Performance client arrangements, whereby the call center
fees for service can be aligned with the program’s overall success in
producing incremental online sales.”

Zia also sees integration and improved technology as growth drivers for this
sector. He says, “Enterprises will move beyond contact center to a customer
interaction network with hosted contact centers for both enterprise
customers and service providers. In a central office or data center, service
providers will host the contact center infrastructure software, which will
be shared by multiple business customers. Subscribing business customers
will have IP or time-division multiplexing (TDM) infrastructures or a
combination of the two.”

A suite of integrated services can also be introduced, he says, like virtual
call centers, network routing with computer telephony integration (CTI),
networked interactive voice response (IVR), intelligent call routing
(routing calls between contact centers based on call context information,
agent availability, and customer information from databases) and multimedia
applications such as Web collaboration and e-mail response management.

With so much innovation happening and set to happen in this ‘traditional’
sector of BPO, analysts are optimistic of its transformational capabilities
for businesses. “(Its potential to transform) looks evident given the
investments made by the service providers on technology and platforms. In
addition, leading service providers have built modern global services
delivery infrastructures and implemented best practices that allow them to
effectively and efficiently leverage their scale, volume, global capacity
and technology to better serve their clients.” says Pai. To this, Atul
Vashishtha adds that this is a market that will become increasingly global
and Tier 2 players will need to specialize to succeed.

Paul Kukubo
Chief Executive Officer, Kenya ICT Board
PO Box 27150 - 00100
Nairobi, Kenya

12th Floor, Teleposta Towers Koinange Street

Tel +254 20 2089061, +254 20 2211960
Fax: +254 20 2211962
website: www.ict.go.ke
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twitter:@tandaaKENYA
BPO Project: www. doitinkenya.co.ke
Digital Villages Project: www.pasha.co.ke

personal contacts
_______________

Cell: + 254 717 180001

skype: kukubopaul
googletalk: pkukubo
personal blog: www.paulkukubo.co.ke
personal twitter: @pkukubo

____________________
Vision: Kenya becomes a top ten global ICT hub

Mission: To champion and actively enable Kenya to adopt and exploit ICT,
through promotion of partnerships, investments and infrastructure growth for
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